Today's a pretty busy day for baseball news, but I'm leaving in a couple hours to make the Thanksgiving trek back to Western PA and so I don't have a whole lot of time to really write about some things I'd like to tackle today, like the new CBA. 

The new CBA is going to be announced within minutes here, and it's going to include some kind of strict luxury tax on the draft. Exactly what the threshhold is going to be, how strict the tax is, what sort of draft picks teams will lose for repeat violations, etc., but it's clear that it's targeted at keeping the Pirates and Nationals and Royals from spending excessive sums on the draft and that sucks for a number of reasons. The terms appear to be quite strict, and I'm not lying when I say that this has me seriously disillusioned. I want to write more now, but I'm very short on time and the more I read the more livid I get. I'll have more tomorrow, I promise. 

Meanwhile, the Pirates have signed Jake Fox and Shairon Martis. You may recall Fox as the big fellow who played for the Cubs and hits home runs and does literally nothing else, though he's purportedly kind of a catcher. Martis threw a no-hitter for the Dutch team in the World Baseball Classic a few years ago and pitched a bit for the Nationals since then. He's only 24, but he's never really pitched well above Double-A. These guys are probably minor league depth, but at least with a liiiiiitle more upside than your typical minor league depth, which makes them semi-interesting. 

Brian McTaggert is reporting for MLB.com this morning that Clint Barmes has officially signed with the Pirates for two years and $10.5 million. I said I'd write more when the deal was official, so let's get two it. I'll start with two statements: I'm pretty sure that Barmes will be better than Cedeno in 2012, and if Barmes can hit enough that he's as good in 2012 and 2013 as he was in 2011, it'll be a good deal worth every penny for the Pirates and there won't be anything to complain about here.  

That said, there are a number of things that just don't sit well with me about this deal, and they all have more to do with the process that leads to signing Clint Barmes more than the actual signing of him. The first part that bugs me is the age. Barmes will be 33 in March, Cedeno will be 29 in February. Barmes's main value is in his defense, because he generally scores as both a better and more consistent shortstop than Cedeno. You can compare their advanced fielding numbers at FanGraphs (Barmes, Cedeno) and over their careers we've got a pretty good sample size for each at shortstop (3,748 innings for Barmes, 4,492 for Cedeno) and you can see that both UZR and DRS say that Barmes is better than Cedeno (UZR says Barmes is good where Cedeno is average, DRS says Barmes is spectacular while Cedeno is below-average). 

What worries me is the age, of course. At 33, Barmes is pretty clearly past his prime and while he's known for his defense, he doesn't have a great arm for a shortstop. It was a big enough concern for the Astros that they were going to start Tommy Manzanella, who's bat is the equivalent of taking Barmes's bat and dividing it by Ronny Cedeno's bat, over him at short when 2011 began. That means that if he loses a step this year, he won't have a Jack Wilson Laser Cannon to make up for it. Basically, if you're going to sign a shorstop and pay a pretty good price for him solely based on defensive purposes, you'd better be damn sure that he's going to be a very good defensive shortstop. Barmes might be. Heck, he probably will be, but I'm not sure that's good enough for me. 

Let's move on to Barmes's bat. His career 94 wRC+ isn't great, but it's much better than Cedeno's 67. What worries me is that I think he's going to get eaten alive in PNC Park, and because I'm pretty sure that park adjustments don't use splits for handedness, that's something that's could affect Barmes quite a bit more than we might anticipate. I pulled up Barmes's home run chart for 2011 last night and posted it on Twitter. Every home run he hit went to left/left-center and his average homer length was a paltry 376.5 feet. You can click through by season and see that the same thing is generally true of him every year, except that he's not hitting the ball as far as he used to me. If you go back to his FanGraphs page, you'll see that Barmes hits a ton of flyballs every year. So he's right-handed, he pulls the ball a lot, he's starting to lose his power, and he hits a ton of flyballs. I hope I'm wrong here, but I'm not seeing a guy that's going to hit well in PNC Park. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if his batting numbers with the Pirates over the next two years are Cedeno-esque.

Therein lies my problem with the deal: Barmes is probably either equal to or an upgrade on Cedeno, but not dramatically so. Possibly not even noticeably so. In that situation, I'd much rather have the guy on a cheap one-year deal than the guy on a slightly more expensive two-year deal, because it would force the Pirates to re-address the situation after 2012. This just feels to me like they're punting on really upgrading the position for two years. That's fine if they're really planning on upgrading the team somewhere else, but thus far this winter they've replaced Doumit and Cedeno with Barajas and Barmes, and on the whole it's hard to see how the duo the Pirates have is a lot better than the duo the Pirates had.

Ken Rosenthal tweets this afternoon that the Pirates appear to be the leaders to sign the services of Clint Barmes this winter to what would likely be a two-year deal. The Brewers and Giants are also in the mix. Barmes was a pretty good player for the Astros last year, turning in some impressive glovework at shortstop with just a hint of pop (12 homers). 

On the whole, though, I doubt that having Barmes at short would be very different from having Cedeno there. Barmes's OPS since 2006 is .695, which is a little better than Cedeno's (.635) in the same span, except that Barmes played a huge chunk of his games in Colorado and righty-friendly Houston, while Cedeno most of his games in Pittsburgh and Seattle, which have very difficult parks for righties. Barmes's glove grades out a bit better than Cedeno's at short, but it's worth noting that he's barely played there since 2006 (2011 was his first year as a full-time shortstop since the Tulowitzki era began in ColoradO) and so it's a bit harder to make a judgment with the advanced metrics that need a bigger sample size. 

It's also worth noting, of course, that he's four years older than Cedeno and that he's at a point in his career where it's possible his ability to play shortstop will disappear in very short order. Which, I suppose, is to say that it's possible that Barmes will be better than Cedeno in 2012 and it's also possible that he'll be worse. He'll also quite possibly be very bad in 2013. The beauty of the Cedeno option was that it was cheap for 2012 and didn't extend to 2013, which left the Pirates with some time to evaluate d'Arnaud and Mercer and look for a better upgrade through a trade. Signing Barmes to a two-year deal wouldn't be ignoring the Pirates' shortstop problem, exactly, but it'd basically be deferring it until after 2013 rather than trying to tackle it head-on this winter.  

UPDATE: Jon Heyman says the Pirates are "close to a deal" with Barmes. BE STILL MY BEATING HEART! All jokes aside, it is nice to see the Pirates going out and getting guys they want, rather than sitting back and hoping someone falls to them. Unless they sign Barmes to a three-year deal. That will not make me happy. 

UPDATE #2: Heyman says it'll be two years/$11 million for Barmes when finalized. That seems a bit pricey to me, but I'll write more about it when the deal is official. 

The Pirates waited until pretty late last night to announce all of the roster moves they made in advance of the Rule 5 Draft, but the news finally did get out. They started early in the day by claiming Brian Jeroloman and Jeremy Hefner off of waivers and outrighting Matt Pagnozzi to the minors. Jeroloman, from the Blue Jays system, doesn't appear to hit much, but he's got a crazy minor league walk rate (his minor league batting average is .245 and his minor league OBP is .378). I will just assume that the Pirates think highly of his defense because that's usually the reason guys like these get claimed. Still, he's 26, hasn't played in the big leagues yet, and put up a .631 OPS (.295 SLG) in the hitter-friendly PCL in 2011. I'm a little puzzled by this pickup, to be honest. Hefner's a bit tougher to judge; he put up some good strikeout rates in the low minors, including in the extremely hitter-friendly California League, but he's struggled a bit in Double-A and Triple-A with those strikeout rates dropping some. In the article linked above, Neal Huntington calls him a victim of the PCL (that's probably true to an extent; check out how his homer rate ballooned this year) and says that the Pirates' scouts have liked Hefner for a while. It's true that most of San Diego's affiliates play in pretty extreme and dangerous environments for pitchers, so it's possible that there's more here than initially meets the eye. Still, I wouldn't expect him to be more than rotation depth, though it seems like there's a chance that he'll be better rotation depth than guys like Brian Burres and Aaron Thompson. 

In terms of the Rule 5 moves, most of the pre-deadline speculation was pretty accurate. The Pirates added Starling Marte, Rudy Owens, Justin Wilson, Jordy Mercer, Matt Hague, and Duke Welker to the roster. The only person I thought might be added that wasn't was Brett Lorin, and while I think it'd be a shame to lose him, it's likely a safe gamble that a guy that will be 25 before the season starts and hasn't pitched above Advanced-A will slide through the draft. It's true that the Pirates lost Nathan Adcock on a similar gamble last year, but he's a bit younger than Lorin and that likely made him more attractive to the Royals.

To clear room for the six new players, the Pirates designated both Xavier Paul and Eric Fryer for assignment. Paul was certainly an expected move and the Pirates won't miss him, but I was surprised to see Fryer DFA'd. I suspect it's a calculated risk to let them keep both him and Jason Jaramillo (Jaramillo has six years minor league service, so I think if they DFA'd him and he cleared waivers he'd be able to opt for free agency, unless I'm mistaken) as they may still need Jaramillo early in the season to back up Rod Barajas and Fryer probably has a good chance of clearing waivers. Still, they could lose Fryer here. He's got a strong defensive reputation and he's shown the ability to hit here and there and the catching market this winter is obviously thin. Anyone that picked him up would be taking a bit of a flyer that he's ready, but, I dunno, I think he's an interesting player despite his age. It seems to me that after last year's catching debacle the Pirates are trying to get as much depth as possible behind Barajas and if Fryer slips through waivers they'd have McKenry, Jaramillo, Jeroloman, and Fryer. I'm worried, though that this might be a case of trying to have their cake and eat it, too; Fryer's the only one I'm even remotely interested in long-term as a Tony Sanchez Insurance Policy and Jeroloman seems like a waste of a roster spot. If Fryer gets through waivers, there's no harm done and it was a good gamble by the front office. If they lose him, it'll be hard to see it as anything other than a mistake. 

Jerry Crasnick reports this afternoon that Ryan Doumit has signed a one-year/$3 million deal with the Twins. I guess Doumit makes sense as a competent back-up for the oft-injured Joe Mauer, plus a DH or a guy that can spell the oft-inured Justin Morneau from time to time, but it seems to me that this indicates that the market for Doumit wasn't nearly as hot as we were lead to believe last week. Doumit's likely looking for playing time to parlay into a bigger deal if he can stay healthy, which is obviously far from a sure thing with him. 

If you want to be skeptical, you can view this as evidence of a Pirate Tax, since Doumit's now making less than the Pirates are paying Rod Barajas. I don't think Doumit would've come back to Pittsburgh for $3 million (or $4 million, for that matter) and so the Pirates had to do something. In any case it's clear that the Pirates weren't the only ones with reservations about Doumit's health and poor defense behind the plate and that picking up his option would've been overpaying him at this point in his career. 

The best news to come out of this is that since Doumit has signed before the non-tender deadline, the Pirates will get a sandwich-round compensation pick without having to worry about offering him arbitration and having him accept. If Type B free agents still net comp picks when the new CBA is unveiled next Monday. Currently the best indication is that the 2012 draft compensation will happen under the old rules and any changes will go into effect in 2013, but we really won't know for sure for a couple of days. 

I mentioned this yesterday, but I wrote a bit longer about it at the Outside Corner: the new realignment and scheduling agreement means that the DH is coming to the NL sooner or later.

As you likely know by now, today is the day the Pirates have to finalize their 40-man roster for the Winter Meetings and the Rule 5 draft. Both WTM and Tim have good preveiws (Bucs Dugout, Pirates Prospects) and I'd recommend that you read them, because the Pirates have quite a few decisions to make today. 

As it stands right now, the Bucs have 34 players on the 40-man roster after Brandon Wood was outrighted and claimed by the Rockies yesterday. It's probably safe to assume that the Pirates will leave a roster spot open for a Rule 5 pick, which means that the Pirates will be adding at least five players to the roster and possibly more (Matt Pagnozzi or Jason Jaramillo, Xavier Paul, and Pedro Ciriaco could all be removed from the roster, while Jose Veras, Ross Ohlendorf, Garrett Jones, and a few other guys are potential non-tenders that could be outrighted a bit early). That's a huge amount of the 40-man, when you really get down to it. 

There are a few no-brainers here. Starling Marte will certainly need to be added and it's hard to imagine any circumstance under which Rudy Owens and Justin Wilson aren't added, too. That's already three of the five spots, with Matt Hague, Jordy Mercer, Andrew Lambo, Tim Alderson, Brett Lorin, Aaron Pribanic, Diego Moreno, and Duke Welker still left to consider. I would add Quincy Latimore, but then I'd be immediately taking him off the list because he doesn't have enough power to balance his .308 career minor league OBP and it'd be pretty shocking to see him drafted. 

So, let's start our 39-man roster at 34, then remove Matt Pagnozzi and Xavier Paul from the roster (32). Marte, Wilson, and Owens all go on, which brings us to 35. We've got four slots left. I think the Pirates have to give Mercer and Hague roster spots because really, the Pirates are probably going to need them on the big league roster in 2012. Mercer might be the best shortstop of the d'Arnaud/Ciriaco/Mercer trio and risking letting him go at this point wouldn't be very bright. Hague, meanwhile, could be useful as a platoon first baseman if the Pirates play Garrett Jones or some scrap-heap reject lefty at first base (Branyan!). They're both close enough to the Majors with interesting enough skills that they could be lost in the draft, even if neither is a super-prospect. Remember: the Pirates drafted Josh Rodriguez last year; someone would probably be willing to take a flyer on Mercer or Hague. 

Now we're at 37, which leaves a spot for two out of Lambo, Alderson, Lorin, Pribanic, Moreno, and Welker. Lambo, as usual, is a difficult call. He's only 23 and he just had a decent year in Double-A, but he's been a Double-A regular since 2009 and he flamed out in Triple-A in 2011. He's still a semi-prospect, so it's possible that someone will draft him and hide him to try and reap future rewards, but he might be really tough to hide given his performance with Indy in 2010. Alderson creates kind of the same pinch, he's still really young and projectible and he was really good early in 2011 after being moved to the bullpen, but he flamed out in the second half. If I'm the Pirates, I'd take my risks and leave him unprotected, but if they do so I'm also pretty sure that someone will take a chance on him. 

So, we've got two spots for Lorin, Pribanic, Moreno, and Welker now. I'd protect Lorin and I think the Pirates will, too. He's a big guy (6'7") that has interesting stuff and very good numbers in the low minors, but health problems have dictated that he was still in the low minors at the age of 24 last year. The Pirates probably could've moved him to Altoona last year and didn't, which may be indicative of something. Still, if he's healthy in 2012 he could be a quick riser and find himself in Triple-A or even Pittsburgh late in the year and he's old enough that someone may take a flier on him based on the idea that his age makes him more advanced than most guys that haven't risen above Advanced-A. Pribanic, meanwhile, strikes me as someone the Pirates might protect (think Mike Crotta), but who'd I'd be slow to hold on to. He's a sinkerballer that doesn't do much else, so as a result he's got a decent minor league ERA but a Zach Duke strikeout rate (a strikeout every other inning) even as a 24-year old in Double-A. 

Lorin brings us to 38, so we've got one final spot for the two relievers, Welker and Moreno. Moreno was really intriguing back in 2009 when he struck out more than a hitter an inning with West Virginia, but he's had behavioral problems and control problems and at 24, still spent some time in Advanced-A this year and struggled at Double-A. Welker, meanwhile, was the second round pick way back in 2007 and seemed hopelessly lost at sea until this year, when he suddenly he found some control and became an effective reliever for Bradenton and Altoona. If I were picking between the two, I'd take Welker because he's improving whereas I think Moreno may have stagnated, but it's not exactly an either/or because Alderson or Lambo or Pribanic could all go in this spot, too. It's also possible that the Pirates will open up more roster spots (no one would really miss Ciriaco, I don't think, and Ohlendorf and Veras a pretty likely to be gone in a few weeks anyway) or they could fill the roster to 40 just not make a pick this year, since they haven't had much success in the draft since the miracle Evan Meek pick a few years ago. 

Regardless, though, I think that Marte, Owens, Wilson, Mercer, and Hague should all be protected and I'd take Lorin, too. After that, it's a bit more of a crapshoot and it probably matters a little bit less, but I'd expect the Pirates to at least take a couple guys out of the Lambo/Alderson/Pribanic/Welker/Moreno pool, if not more.  

Major League Baseball has approved of the sale of the Astros to Jim Crane today, and with it the announcement that the Astros will move to the American League in 2013 is official. If you remember back to my FanHouse days, I've written quite a bit about realignment and how dumb I think having unbalanced leagues and divisions are and I'm happy those days will finally be over. I don't really care about the Astros either way (some of my worst memories of the 1990s at Three Rivers are hot summer Sunday afternoon games with Bagwell and Biggio destroying the Pirates and Drabek and Shane Reynolds on the mound dominating), but they seem like a weird choice to go to the AL given their extensive NL history. When Milwaukee flipped leagues, the city at least had an NL legacy. Houston has nothing to do with the AL and I would've thought moving a team like the Marlins or Diamondbacks would make more sense. 

On a sadder note, I'm almost certain that making interleague play a constant "30 games per year" thing for every team is going to bring the DH to the NL within five years. Selig says things won't change, but I don't believe him. We might as well all just accept it now. 

I realize this is yesterday's news, but I wanted to talk a bit about Rob Biertempfel's report that extension talks have cooled between the Pirates and Neil Walker. On the surface, this isn't a big deal. Walker's a solid-but-not-spetacular second baseman and he will, at the very most, be a super-two eligible for arbitration after the 2012 season. It would be nice for the Pirates to get some cost certainty with him and to maybe tease down the price in the event that he does become a super-two, but it's not something that needs to be imminent. The Pirates have much more immediate things to worry about for the upcoming season and they have a better player in Andrew McCutchen, who should be more of a priority even if he'll be a tougher sign. 

Of course, it's not so easy with Walker because he's from Pittsburgh. That makes him popular with the fans and (most annoyingly to me) that makes him the guy the team pushes out front, even if that means having the broadcasting team spew nonsense about his RBI totals night after during the summer. Whenever this happens, I tend to go out of my way to point out Walker's shortcomings, which in turn makes a lot of Pirate fans angry at me because Walker is lots of Pirate fans' favorite player, for obvious reason. This starts an endless cycle of bickering and so I want to take a step back and assess Walker a bit better as a player and try to get a better idea of what the Pirates should be trying to do with him in the coming years. 

Because the Baseball Establishment -- from the managers to the broadcasters to the portion of the media that is staid in their beliefs -- can be so inflexible in their reliance on "traditional" baseball stats (and thus, in how the game is related from them to the public), bloggers like me that write with a saber-slant have a tendency to go overboard in making points that question the status quo. Take, for example, the Jonathan Papelbon contract. Papelbon's deal with the Phillies is worth between $12 and $12.5 million over four or five years. That's a ton of money to pay for a reliever and the general saber-consensus is that relievers simply aren't worth that much because they don't pitch that much. In six full seasons with the Red Sox, though, FanGraphs estimates that Papelbon was worth about $62 million. Now maybe there's something to be said for WAR as it translates to value for relievers (that is, good relievers often come out of nowhere and can be very underpaid and thus maybe the shorthand of 1 win = $4-$5 million doesn't hold true for them, but of course mediocre relievers often get huge deals and so we could go in this circle forever) and if that's true the Red Sox overpaid, but the reality is that Jonathan Papelbon is an excellent reliever who's been head and shoulders better than anyone not named Mariano Rivera since 2006 and by the same metrics that people use to evaluate players, he's very nearly worth the money the Phillies are paying him. But since relievers are often overpaid and because pointing this out is one of every stat-head's hobby horses, a lot got made about Papelbon's deal even though it's entirely possible (or, at the very least not out of the realm of discussion) that the Phillies really didn't overpay for him by that much. 

I use this as an example because this is what I do with Neil Walker. Walker is praised by broadcasters and writers and Pirate fans for 1.) his high RBI totals (his 83 RBIs lead all NL second baseman and was third in baseball), 2.) his glove (his fielding percentage tied Brandon Phillips for the best in the NL at second base) and 3.) the general perception that he's clutch. These things drive me crazy because 1.) RBIs are very context-based and not really a meaningful indicator of anything on their own, 2.) his glove isn't that great and it's not hard to see his range is kind of poor when you watch him play and 3.) that's a silly reason to think a player is good. And so I spend a lot of time railing against RBIs and pointing out Walker's shortcomings as a fielder and destroying arguments about clutch, but I don't spend a lot of time saying this: Neil Walker is actually a pretty good second baseman. 

If we stick with FanGraphs' WAR as a metric, there were only nine second basemen better than Walker in 2011, and only four of them were in the National League. And if you look at any advanced fielding metric, they'll all tell you that Walker got a lot better in 2011. He went from -9 to -5 in Defensive Runs Saved, even though he played more games in 2011. He went from -17.1 to -2.5 in UZR/150. His dWAR at Baseball-Reference (based on Total Zone Rating) went from -0.9 to -0.3. I understand that a lot of people are on the fence about these advanced fielding metrics for a lot of reasons (some good, some not so good), but when three of them agree the way do here I feel pretty good about drawing the general conclusion that while Walker was pretty bad with the glove in 2010, he wasn't nearly as bad in 2011 even if he wasn't quite as good as people think. 

And at the plate, just throw the RBIs out for a second. Forget about them entirely. Walker hit .273/.334/.408 in 2011. The average NL second baseman hit .258/.319/.380. Walker did it despite struggling from the right side of the plate for a huge chunk of the year and with a huge power-outage after May 20th (he had six homers on May 20th, he finished with 12). Those numbers are a step back from his 2010 numbers for sure, but remember that in 2009 he had a .304 OBP at Triple-A. His walk rate last year, one of everyone's biggest concerns, was 8.4%, which is well-improved from his 6.7% at Indianapolis. In general, I think he's showed a positive offensive trend in his two years with the Pirates even if last year as a bit of a step backwards from 2010. 

So where does Walker go from here? I don't know that his ceiling is much higher than what we saw in 2011, to be honest. In general it seems like players peak young defensively, though Walker's relative inexperience at the position might make him the exception to that rule. I do think he can probably hit with a bit more power than we saw last year, though I'm concerned about the switch-hitting struggles. All the same, though, if Walker can be around a 3 WAR player for the Pirates for the four years (and maybe beyond if they get that extension worked out), he'll be a very solid player and second base will be a position the Pirates won't have to worry about for a while. It won't be for any of the reasons that you might read about in the newspaper or hear on TV, but it'll still be true. 

Mike Fast has been doing some great work at Baseball Prospectus this year, and today he continues it with a look at how the speed off of the bat affects balls in play for both hitters and pitchers. It can get pretty dense, but Fast does a good job explaining both where the sabermetric consensus on pitchers and balls in in play is today and where it can go with this sort of analysis, plus he's promising a second, more extensive article. I'd highly recommend reading the whole thing, because it's very interesting stuff.

The short version of it, though, is that pitchers do appear to have some control over how the speed off of the bat, which would imply that they also have some control over batting average on balls in play. They don't have as much control over it as batters do (which is why stats like DIPS and FIP have been useful), but they do have some control. There's obviously a lot more analysis to be done, relating these numbers back to performance, but it does look like it's a big leap in understanding what pitchers can and can't control on the mound.